Incorrect, in cases such as these rather than fining the country in question, one form of restitution is to allow the winning country (Antigua) to "take payment" in the form of ignoring copyrights of the losing country (US) up to a certain value.
That might protect Antigua, but has essentially zero to do with the WTO's decision being any defense against the the RIAA, ironclad or otherwise, for copyright-violating Americans.
Like GP said (humorously) - it's just one of those inflammatory leading questions/. likes to have at the end of article summaries..
corn derived ethanol is the only practical alternative to gasoline and it's renewable.
But ethanol isn't really renewable, at least not in the sense you're thinking, because we have to use so much oil-derived fertilizer to grow it each year.
I read an interesting article in Harper's about this a while back, called "The oil we eat". It says that "According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest". Even if the USDA is correct (and I'm suspicious), that's not a lot of savings.
Also, I don't see any easy way to create ethanol using renewable energy sources in the future - we'd have to come up with a way to create fertilizer (or otherwise inject energy into the soil for the corn to use) using wind or solar power. Maybe not impossible, but I've not heard of anyone even trying.. so it's not like the situation with ethanol is likely to improve much over time, either.
Yeah, it's amazing how much the porn world has changed, huh?
For me at 11, it was the phone-book-sized JC Penney's catalogs (remember those?). Playboy seemed very raunchy then, when we discovered our friend's Dad's in the garage; one didn't necessarily leave it on the coffee table, if you know what I mean. Now Cosmo shows almost as much skin..
Another thing: there used to be a "Shaved" magazine - now, if you ever happen across not-shaved poon in porn (or Playboy), it's notable.
Or remember when anal or DP or ass-to-mouth seemed.. uh, pleasingly smutty? Now it's just more of the same, eh?
Is it just me, or as net porn has taken over ever more of the industry, has it generally been getting raunchier? I think maybe as a society, we're becoming ever more jaded about sex, to the point where just watching two people fuck is pretty bland. Things that used to generally be thought transgressive are now de rigeur. I kind of worry about what's happening to our collective perception of "normal" sex, given the ever-increasing levels of misogyny and filth in net porn, and its ever-widening availability.
Well, I am in my 30s now, after all; maybe worrying about such things is just what 30-somethings do, while the 11 year olds continue to whack off many times a day.;-)
But, like you, I've been curtailing my porn use lately, or sometimes just browsing some TGPs instead of watching hardcore videos, for fear that fruit-and-horse-free sex with my gf will start to seem banal..
They actually use the phrase 'don't be evil'. The difference, as I see it, is that 'do no evil' paralyzes you when you have to choose among two evils; 'don't be evil' just makes sure that whatever evil you choose, you choose with the best intentions.
Thank you! I can't believe how many people get that wrong, and/or misunderstand what Page & Brin were trying to say about their intentions with "don't be evil".
I mean, I fear and mistrust Google (and any large corporation, especially any focused on advertising and collecting information) as much as the next guy, but the level of willful misunderstanding surrounding Google's "don't be evil" stance is just boggling...
Why would authority really want to eliminate bullying? Generally speaking, that is the class that most all future business and political leaders come from! Example with the same age group, look at the number one top team sport in the US, football. The bullies win, and the conniving and more clever bullies win easier. It's the biggest deal in the public high schools,certainly not the chess club for a counter example, and your team has to physically and with much aggression "beat" the other team, and the team stars are the heroes, pushed by the same authority system that says they are anti bully.
You're almost right - the lesson is that exercising aggression is good, if and only if it's in one of the pre-approved ways. Working against bullying would provide a useful counterexample in that lesson - i.e. "you will show aggression when we say it's okay, not when you think it's okay".
Take soldiers, for instance - you want them to be highly aggressive, obviously, but only in certain ways. Same with "future business and political leaders"...
There's probably a name for it in psychology - some kind of sublimation, maybe? To control someone and still have them be effective, you want to constrain their actions, but encourage them to compensate for those constraints by acting out in other ways. (Ways that either don't hurt you, or (if you're really clever) serve your ends as well.)
I do all of my own home and car maintenance. I built a gym in my home rather than pay out monthlies. I don't eat out much, I don't go to convenience stores except to buy gas.
Ouch.. what's the point of having wealth, then?;-)
Individuals bribing elected representatives is every bit as morally corrupt as companies doing so
I don't really disagree with your statement, as you've stated it, but IMHO the "non-PAC" the GP described isn't really "individuals bribing". It's closer in sentiment to publically-funded elections (but with a free-market approach).
With the large number of voters involved that he's implying, I don't think the non-PAC would represent any "special interests" - more like the "general interest", to coin a term. It would be more to counter (and reduce the meaningfulness/impact) of special-interest money.
I'm partially playing devil's advocate here, so let me just throw in another point: our system (assuming you're American) now seems to be run by moneyed interests. Not ideal, but given that situation, a pragmatic approach may be in order. And if you're not willing to cough up a few (extra) bucks in support of your positions, how important could they really be to you?
It's something to think about, at the very least, rather than dismissing out of hand.
If someone does manage to submit a ballot with two marks, it doesn't get counted, since the only person who can legally determine the intent of a voter is a judge. (I suppose you could put them all to the side and wait to see if the election is close enough to warrant bothering to look at them, but frankly I'd prefer that they just get thrown out.
First, I agree with the basic sentiments of your post. You are, in the main, exactly correct.
But voting systems, given the constraints - perfect anonymity, one-vote-per-person, and count-every-vote - are just hard to do well. Your statement above is a great example of this: if we adopted your suggestion, any polling worker with a UV-reflective marker could "invalidate" votes just by marking an extra candidate or two. The over-marked ballots would then be set aside and left uncounted.
But I do agree with you that the submitted ballot should be paper.. electronic systems are exponentially easier to cheat without getting caught.
He doesn't need the money, his company is small in terms of staff and he set forth a goal which is not to compete directly with Microsoft but a more altruistic level by addressing the computing needs of people in general.
Yeah, kinda.. but on the other hand, remember Ubuntu bug #1: "Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix."
Bingo. I think you've also touched, indirectly, on the bigger issue: original content. If you don't have any original content, then you can't well charge admission! Papers that basically just re-run the same wire service reports as everyone else, can't adopt the WSJ's business model, because there are lots of other, cheaper (free) sources for the same thing.
Yep - that's because traditionally, newspapers have been in the news distribution business, as well as the news gathering business. Since distribution got so much easier, quicker, cheaper and better after the advent of widespread internet access (and Google's indexing tech), the traditional newspapers are now finding it a much less lucrative business.
While it sounds like a really good thing (for the general public) that we're able to potentially streamline and improve news distribution so dramatically, it actually has some potentially destructive side effects as well... it turns out that the news-distribution side of the business was actually subsidizing the news-gathering operation, and so as revenues have fallen, the traditional practice of "hard journalism" has suffered.
That's not the only problem with the news, of course - another big one, in the US at least, is that the corporations which run the news outlets now demand that they be highly profitable (especially the TV news operations, which are facing a lot of the same issues as the newspapers are, due to the rise of internet news), and don't see much or any "public service" type of role for the news any more... Frontline recently ran a great report on the news media, covering that and related issues in depth.
Does the 'hidden' 30 second skip feature still work after the select-play-select-3-0-select key sequence?
Since nobody else bothered to reply: yeah, that still works fine.
I don't know what I'd do without that, now that I'm used to it... probably quit watching TV.
Ads in the guide??
Yeah.:-/ They're not bad at all, really, as far as ads go - but it sort of grates on my anyway.
There's sometimes (~75% of the time) an extra menu item at the end on the TiVo Central screen, that leads to a promo if you click it. It's just like the other menu items except it has a star to the left of it. And every now and then (~10% of the time) there's some kind of ad thingy just above the delete/keep recording menu presented when you hit the end of a recorded show... not sure where that leads, as I've never clicked one. It's about 2 standard menu items tall and colored differently.
Speaking of which: does anyone know of any project for standardizing re-scheming of remote sites? With enough people behind it you could really make sites stop clashing with the rest of your screen and become a lot more usable with nothing more than usercontent.css preferably, or at worst some javascript courtesy of greasemonkey
A lot of the people using userstyles.org seem to share your interest in applying a standard theme to all sites, matching Google to their custom skins, etc -- moreso than Greasemonkey users, anyway, who mostly seem into tweaking single sites one at a time, in my experience.
So if you want to try to get something going, that would probably be the best place to start..
So, if I rob a lot of banks, liquerstores and pawnshop, and then give away 33%, I'm a hero? Kewl!
I've always tended toward the anti-MS camp, myself, but your post reminded me of Robin Hood, who is popularly considered a hero, and that got me thinking..
I'd never thought of it this way before, but Gates could be seen as a kind of Robin Hood: just as Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, Gates gouged the wealthier parts of the world with unethical business practices, and then donated a lot of the money he gained to the poorer parts of the world.
From that point of view, Gates really is a.. hero! *head asplode*
I live in France, where I have Free as an ISP. The ADSL service is 24Mbps
Yep, I'm jealous. I remember thinking minitel was pretty cool too, back when I was just dialing into local BBSes here in America.. You lucky French bastards!;-)
But I'm actually replying because I'm curious about your ISP's name. I would have expected "libre" instead of "free"..
First I thought it might be a UK company that crossed the channel, but the site is all in French, and the contact page lists Paris numbers and says that service is only available in France, so that shoots down that idea.
And while it might be a marking thing to call something free "libre" here in America, I had the impression that in France it would rather be common to view the English language as.. er, common, not exotic or literate.
So I thought I'd just ask and see if you had any ideas. =)
No, what should be drilled into people's heads is that science and religion are not mutually exclusive. It's this stupid false dichotomy that's the problem.
In an ideal world, what you're saying would be true. And I even think that in some cases, with some types of "religion" (or "faith"), what you're saying *is* true.
But in the case of the American fundamentalists, at least, it's not true. They envision their religion as that which you consider to be religion + that which you consider to be science -- and since science is therefore challenging and disagreeing with their religion-as-science beliefs about creation, they fight it.
So those of us who value rational thought and the scientific method have basically two choices: we can fight back, or we can accept that in some parts of America, theocratic dogma will be taught to children as scientific fact.
Me? I'm not willing to accept that.
I honestly don't think it's arrogance, either; in the cases where faith doesn't interfere with science -- many buddhists I know seem to have worked that out, for instance -- I'm perfectly happy for science to not interfere with faith. But when religious dogma masquerades as rational thought, I believe it's an ethical duty to fight it.
f the OSS development community really does get divided by this, we're going to see a lot of forking going on, if members of any project disagree on changing to GPLv3.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are worried about this; it's a big part of why the discussion is so heated, I think..
I mean, the FOSS licenses and their interactions are already too complicated: GPL/LGPL vs. BSD is understandable, but then there's the Apache license, Perl's artistic license, the MPL, Sun's CDDL, the PHP License, and tons more.. it gets hard to even keep track of the acronyms, much less what licenses can be mixed and so on. And now there might be a huge split between GPLv2 people and GPLv3 people? Yuck.:-/
But it seems inevitable. Certainly Linux will remain under GPLv2, because it's not practically possible to change it, even if Linus could be convinced. And RMS will clearly move all GNU code that the FSF controls to GPLv3.
It's a possible scenario. I don't know for certain whether it will be widespread or even if it's really a bad thing. Another thing I am not clear on: people are saying that GPLv3 and GPLv2 are "compatible". How will a v2 and a v3 fork be able to merge at a later date? Can the v2 fork take the v3 code and keep the v2 license?
As far as I can see, for that to be possible, the GPLv3-licensed code would need to include a special provision that it could be used under a previous version of the GPL. Sort of the like the built-in provision for future license versions, but in reverse. That basically throws away the benefits of using GPLv3 at all, though, so I don't see it happening much.
The way Linus sees it is from the "developer" viewpoint. The code is still free from this viewpoint, since all modifications are published. You can modify it and run it on a DRM-free machine. The FSF rather thinks of the "end users" viewpoint, where modifying the code and running the modified code on the same machine is paramount.
Yeah, it took me a while to understand Linus's point of view, but eventually after reading all of his recent Groklaw posts, I arrived at the same understanding you did. Basically Linus thinks of the code as completely distinct from the hardware, and as such GPLv2 provides as much protection to the software as he cares for. Which does makes perfect sense, as far as it goes..
The FSF's stance, on the other hand, is basically that, in the case of something like a TiVo (which I own and love, BTW), the hardware and software work together to provide a single device. From the user's point of view, anyway. Basically, because the TiVo hardware is so reliant on its software to work, you could conceptually think of the entire thing *almost* as a "derivative work" of the GPLed software it contains. So the FSF is basically trying to set up a situation where the software on such a device is protected with roughly the same strength as an LGPLv2ed library: the "client code" (or in this case, hardware) can be as proprietary as it likes, but must allow the "library" (the GPLed software it runs) to be swapped out freely by the user.
Both as a user, and as a developer who occasionally releases GPLed code, I tend to prefer the latter point of view. As a TiVo owner, I dislike the fact that TiVo benefited from the Linux kernel, but refuses to pass that benefit on to me.
And the provisions in GPLv3 are definitely in the spirit of the original GPL's intent. They're trying to fix an oversight, not expand the GPL's reach. I mean, when I learned about the TiVo's signed binaries (after purchasing one), I thought of them as a hack around the intent of the GPL, so it's not surprising to me that the FSF is trying to close that loophole. They're not actually trying to expand the GPL, just prevent it from being trampled.
It's a hard problem to solve, and I actually do think Linus has a valid point; GPLv3 as it stands might eliminate some valid, desirable uses of GPLed software. But I think the bigger potential problem is that, with a TPM chip in every consumer device, if the GPL doesn't explicitly protect us from TiVoization, we'll de-facto lose the ability to modify GPLed software on our machines. It'll be legal, but technically not viable. It would be better if, as Linus believes, market forces would fix that problem, but to me that seems unlikely..
Slashdot Mirror
That might protect Antigua, but has essentially zero to do with the WTO's decision being any defense against the the RIAA, ironclad or otherwise, for copyright-violating Americans.
Like GP said (humorously) - it's just one of those inflammatory leading questions /. likes to have at the end of article summaries..
But ethanol isn't really renewable, at least not in the sense you're thinking, because we have to use so much oil-derived fertilizer to grow it each year.
I read an interesting article in Harper's about this a while back, called "The oil we eat". It says that "According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest". Even if the USDA is correct (and I'm suspicious), that's not a lot of savings.
Also, I don't see any easy way to create ethanol using renewable energy sources in the future - we'd have to come up with a way to create fertilizer (or otherwise inject energy into the soil for the corn to use) using wind or solar power. Maybe not impossible, but I've not heard of anyone even trying.. so it's not like the situation with ethanol is likely to improve much over time, either.
Err.. and how is that not blame-worthy, exactly?
Do you have a source/reference for this statistic?
Thanks.
So true. And I've got a new sig now, thanks. =)
Yeah, it's amazing how much the porn world has changed, huh?
;-)
For me at 11, it was the phone-book-sized JC Penney's catalogs (remember those?). Playboy seemed very raunchy then, when we discovered our friend's Dad's in the garage; one didn't necessarily leave it on the coffee table, if you know what I mean. Now Cosmo shows almost as much skin..
Another thing: there used to be a "Shaved" magazine - now, if you ever happen across not-shaved poon in porn (or Playboy), it's notable.
Or remember when anal or DP or ass-to-mouth seemed.. uh, pleasingly smutty? Now it's just more of the same, eh?
Is it just me, or as net porn has taken over ever more of the industry, has it generally been getting raunchier? I think maybe as a society, we're becoming ever more jaded about sex, to the point where just watching two people fuck is pretty bland. Things that used to generally be thought transgressive are now de rigeur. I kind of worry about what's happening to our collective perception of "normal" sex, given the ever-increasing levels of misogyny and filth in net porn, and its ever-widening availability.
Well, I am in my 30s now, after all; maybe worrying about such things is just what 30-somethings do, while the 11 year olds continue to whack off many times a day.
But, like you, I've been curtailing my porn use lately, or sometimes just browsing some TGPs instead of watching hardcore videos, for fear that fruit-and-horse-free sex with my gf will start to seem banal..
Fixed. =)
Thank you! I can't believe how many people get that wrong, and/or misunderstand what Page & Brin were trying to say about their intentions with "don't be evil".
I mean, I fear and mistrust Google (and any large corporation, especially any focused on advertising and collecting information) as much as the next guy, but the level of willful misunderstanding surrounding Google's "don't be evil" stance is just boggling...
You're almost right - the lesson is that exercising aggression is good, if and only if it's in one of the pre-approved ways. Working against bullying would provide a useful counterexample in that lesson - i.e. "you will show aggression when we say it's okay, not when you think it's okay".
Take soldiers, for instance - you want them to be highly aggressive, obviously, but only in certain ways. Same with "future business and political leaders"...
There's probably a name for it in psychology - some kind of sublimation, maybe? To control someone and still have them be effective, you want to constrain their actions, but encourage them to compensate for those constraints by acting out in other ways. (Ways that either don't hurt you, or (if you're really clever) serve your ends as well.)
Ouch.. what's the point of having wealth, then? ;-)
I don't really disagree with your statement, as you've stated it, but IMHO the "non-PAC" the GP described isn't really "individuals bribing". It's closer in sentiment to publically-funded elections (but with a free-market approach).
With the large number of voters involved that he's implying, I don't think the non-PAC would represent any "special interests" - more like the "general interest", to coin a term. It would be more to counter (and reduce the meaningfulness/impact) of special-interest money.
I'm partially playing devil's advocate here, so let me just throw in another point: our system (assuming you're American) now seems to be run by moneyed interests. Not ideal, but given that situation, a pragmatic approach may be in order. And if you're not willing to cough up a few (extra) bucks in support of your positions, how important could they really be to you?
It's something to think about, at the very least, rather than dismissing out of hand.
First, I agree with the basic sentiments of your post. You are, in the main, exactly correct.
But voting systems, given the constraints - perfect anonymity, one-vote-per-person, and count-every-vote - are just hard to do well. Your statement above is a great example of this: if we adopted your suggestion, any polling worker with a UV-reflective marker could "invalidate" votes just by marking an extra candidate or two. The over-marked ballots would then be set aside and left uncounted.
But I do agree with you that the submitted ballot should be paper.. electronic systems are exponentially easier to cheat without getting caught.
Yep - that's because traditionally, newspapers have been in the news distribution business, as well as the news gathering business. Since distribution got so much easier, quicker, cheaper and better after the advent of widespread internet access (and Google's indexing tech), the traditional newspapers are now finding it a much less lucrative business.
While it sounds like a really good thing (for the general public) that we're able to potentially streamline and improve news distribution so dramatically, it actually has some potentially destructive side effects as well... it turns out that the news-distribution side of the business was actually subsidizing the news-gathering operation, and so as revenues have fallen, the traditional practice of "hard journalism" has suffered.
That's not the only problem with the news, of course - another big one, in the US at least, is that the corporations which run the news outlets now demand that they be highly profitable (especially the TV news operations, which are facing a lot of the same issues as the newspapers are, due to the rise of internet news), and don't see much or any "public service" type of role for the news any more... Frontline recently ran a great report on the news media, covering that and related issues in depth.
Since nobody else bothered to reply: yeah, that still works fine. I don't know what I'd do without that, now that I'm used to it... probably quit watching TV.
Yeah. :-/ They're not bad at all, really, as far as ads go - but it sort of grates on my anyway.
There's sometimes (~75% of the time) an extra menu item at the end on the TiVo Central screen, that leads to a promo if you click it. It's just like the other menu items except it has a star to the left of it. And every now and then (~10% of the time) there's some kind of ad thingy just above the delete/keep recording menu presented when you hit the end of a recorded show... not sure where that leads, as I've never clicked one. It's about 2 standard menu items tall and colored differently.
Interesting post. Wish I had mod points for you..
A lot of the people using userstyles.org seem to share your interest in applying a standard theme to all sites, matching Google to their custom skins, etc -- moreso than Greasemonkey users, anyway, who mostly seem into tweaking single sites one at a time, in my experience.
So if you want to try to get something going, that would probably be the best place to start..
U don't think we went to the moon?
Why not tell Louis Armstrong to his face?
Ha! Yeah, that does make it much funnier, thanks. =)
(sorry, no mod points..)Exactly. And now he's acting differently, e.g. by expressing his displeasure with Gracenote. Seems like you agree with him after all..
I've always tended toward the anti-MS camp, myself, but your post reminded me of Robin Hood, who is popularly considered a hero, and that got me thinking..
I'd never thought of it this way before, but Gates could be seen as a kind of Robin Hood: just as Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, Gates gouged the wealthier parts of the world with unethical business practices, and then donated a lot of the money he gained to the poorer parts of the world.
From that point of view, Gates really is a .. hero! *head asplode*
Yep, I'm jealous. I remember thinking minitel was pretty cool too, back when I was just dialing into local BBSes here in America.. You lucky French bastards! ;-)
But I'm actually replying because I'm curious about your ISP's name. I would have expected "libre" instead of "free"..
First I thought it might be a UK company that crossed the channel, but the site is all in French, and the contact page lists Paris numbers and says that service is only available in France, so that shoots down that idea.
And while it might be a marking thing to call something free "libre" here in America, I had the impression that in France it would rather be common to view the English language as .. er, common, not exotic or literate.
So I thought I'd just ask and see if you had any ideas. =)
Thanks,
-A curious American
In an ideal world, what you're saying would be true. And I even think that in some cases, with some types of "religion" (or "faith"), what you're saying *is* true.
But in the case of the American fundamentalists, at least, it's not true. They envision their religion as that which you consider to be religion + that which you consider to be science -- and since science is therefore challenging and disagreeing with their religion-as-science beliefs about creation, they fight it.
So those of us who value rational thought and the scientific method have basically two choices: we can fight back, or we can accept that in some parts of America, theocratic dogma will be taught to children as scientific fact.
Me? I'm not willing to accept that.
I honestly don't think it's arrogance, either; in the cases where faith doesn't interfere with science -- many buddhists I know seem to have worked that out, for instance -- I'm perfectly happy for science to not interfere with faith. But when religious dogma masquerades as rational thought, I believe it's an ethical duty to fight it.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are worried about this; it's a big part of why the discussion is so heated, I think..
I mean, the FOSS licenses and their interactions are already too complicated: GPL/LGPL vs. BSD is understandable, but then there's the Apache license, Perl's artistic license, the MPL, Sun's CDDL, the PHP License, and tons more .. it gets hard to even keep track of the acronyms, much less what licenses can be mixed and so on. And now there might be a huge split between GPLv2 people and GPLv3 people? Yuck. :-/
But it seems inevitable. Certainly Linux will remain under GPLv2, because it's not practically possible to change it, even if Linus could be convinced. And RMS will clearly move all GNU code that the FSF controls to GPLv3.
As far as I can see, for that to be possible, the GPLv3-licensed code would need to include a special provision that it could be used under a previous version of the GPL. Sort of the like the built-in provision for future license versions, but in reverse. That basically throws away the benefits of using GPLv3 at all, though, so I don't see it happening much.
Yeah, it took me a while to understand Linus's point of view, but eventually after reading all of his recent Groklaw posts, I arrived at the same understanding you did. Basically Linus thinks of the code as completely distinct from the hardware, and as such GPLv2 provides as much protection to the software as he cares for. Which does makes perfect sense, as far as it goes..
The FSF's stance, on the other hand, is basically that, in the case of something like a TiVo (which I own and love, BTW), the hardware and software work together to provide a single device. From the user's point of view, anyway. Basically, because the TiVo hardware is so reliant on its software to work, you could conceptually think of the entire thing *almost* as a "derivative work" of the GPLed software it contains. So the FSF is basically trying to set up a situation where the software on such a device is protected with roughly the same strength as an LGPLv2ed library: the "client code" (or in this case, hardware) can be as proprietary as it likes, but must allow the "library" (the GPLed software it runs) to be swapped out freely by the user.
Both as a user, and as a developer who occasionally releases GPLed code, I tend to prefer the latter point of view. As a TiVo owner, I dislike the fact that TiVo benefited from the Linux kernel, but refuses to pass that benefit on to me.
And the provisions in GPLv3 are definitely in the spirit of the original GPL's intent. They're trying to fix an oversight, not expand the GPL's reach. I mean, when I learned about the TiVo's signed binaries (after purchasing one), I thought of them as a hack around the intent of the GPL, so it's not surprising to me that the FSF is trying to close that loophole. They're not actually trying to expand the GPL, just prevent it from being trampled.
It's a hard problem to solve, and I actually do think Linus has a valid point; GPLv3 as it stands might eliminate some valid, desirable uses of GPLed software. But I think the bigger potential problem is that, with a TPM chip in every consumer device, if the GPL doesn't explicitly protect us from TiVoization, we'll de-facto lose the ability to modify GPLed software on our machines. It'll be legal, but technically not viable. It would be better if, as Linus believes, market forces would fix that problem, but to me that seems unlikely..